A little farther down the road, there was enough of a gap between the houses on one side of the street that he could see the empty field across the river. There was a line of fresh graves over there as well, outside of the town limits. There were no flowers covering those mounds of bare dirt. Instead of simply but carefully made wooden crosses, each of those graves was marked by a short plank of wood. Grossman knew that only two of the graves had a full name on them. The others were marked by first name only, or a nickname. None of Prange’s men had carried any identification on them. For the most part, none of them knew each other’s full names. The last names on their uniforms belonged to whomever had donated them to a thrift shop, or they’d been stolen from.
It was cold consolation that there were a lot more men buried across the river than in town. This weighed heavily on Grossman as he went to his last stop before his office.
“How’s everybody doing today?” he asked Mark Thorssen as he stepped into the firehouse. The town’s ambulance was parked inside. There were two beds inside of screen houses next to it, with enclosures made of shower curtains inside of those. These were the three citizens of Bowman that were still fighting for their lives against the wounds they’d suffered in the fight. The one in the ambulance had taken bad burns when Prange’s goons tried to burn him out of his house. Keeping him inside the vehicle was the best option Thorssen had been able to come up with to limit his exposure to any contaminants from the outside world. Having survived the initial trauma of the burns, infection was the next biggest risk to his life. The screen houses and shower curtain arrangements for the other two were also there to keep them as clean as possible while they recovered from bad gunshot wounds.
“Not much to report,” Thorssen said. “I’m keeping them clean and doing my best to keep them comfortable, but that’s all I’ve got. There’s nothing I can do from here to help them recover faster, just limit complications so their systems can do the work without distraction.”
Grossman really felt for the man. For as much weight as he felt on his own shoulders, it seemed to him that Thorssen was carrying twice as much. The fire chief was a person who cared deeply about others, having dedicated his life to emergency services. He’d always fought to make sure that his firehouse was as stocked as the town could afford, and he had taken every course on paramedicine he could. But, at the end of the day, he was a highly skilled first responder, not a nurse or a surgeon, and he was stocked to keep somebody alive long enough for an ambulance to get them to a hospital. He simply didn’t have the skills or equipment to handle the work that came after.
Around his neck, Thorssen was wearing several highly polished pennies, drilled through and strung on a length of paracord. Each of the pennies had been minted in the birth year of one of the townsfolk he hadn’t been able to save, or who had subsequently died of their wounds while under his care. Grossman wondered how many more pennies would be added by the time things went back to something that could be called normal.
Grossman said, “I’ve got kids damn near locked in the library, going through every book we’ve got to see about antibiotics and other meds we can make locally. I know you’re not much on the woo and the supplements and throwing granola and incense at problems, but if we can find anything that looks like some solid survival medicine, I’m willing to give it a try.”
“Yeah. I’ve been thinking the same. We’ve got enough people back home that I sent a couple people out foraging. Art Meier had a bunch of stuff on that. Peter had his mom bring a couple books down for me to look at on her last visit to see him.”
Grossman was glad to see he was willing to look at options he would have laughed at a couple of months earlier. “Let’s set up some time for my guys and yours to compare notes. We’ve also got the high school chemistry lab available when it’s time to try some things out.”
“There’s some homebrewers in town that have already offered up access to their equipment, too.” Thorssen cracked a smile, the first one Grossman had seen on his face in a very long time. “And you didn’t hear this from me, but I’m going to need you to make sure the cops don’t go behind the building here. There’s a still out back now, just waiting for a couple of those brewers to deliver some fermented mash. And if anybody comes by to take any of the output for recreational purposes, I’m going to seriously reconsider my feelings on busting people upside the head. I’m going to need every drop of alcohol I get out of it to keep things clean and for making medicines.”
Mark Thorssen was closer to seven feet tall than six and almost as broad as the average doorway, and most of his bulk was beef, not fat. Grossman had seen him use a crowbar to pop a car door off its hinges instead of waiting for the jaws of life to get set up. He hoped he never found himself on the wrong side of one of his fists.
“I’ll do my best to help keep your general pacifism intact,” Grossman said. He’d spent as much time as he could justify checking in on people. It was time for him to get to his office and get to work.
4
Daniel Prange felt like a caged animal, and he did not like it. For all the years he’d spent living outside the law, he’d managed to completely avoid being arrested. A few times, he’d been snatched and thrown into a car at gunpoint, but those moments had been short bursts of terror and desperation. He had known that he would either talk his way out of whatever he’d gotten himself into quickly or he’d die. He’d never had the time or attention to spare for pondering his fate.
Even the incident in Nevada hadn’t had him tied up or thrown into a pit. He’d been told that the Big Boss wanted some words with him. He knew that he’d never be able to outrun the cartel, that doing so would just make things a lot worse when he was eventually caught. So, he showed up at the villa and drank good tequila in the back seat of an armored luxury SUV for the long drive out to the cartel’s dumping ground in the desert. The Big Boss explained to Prange just how bad he’d screwed up. He was given a chance to explain himself.
The whole affair, from the moment when he realized he’d made a huge mistake that was going to cost the cartel a couple million dollars to the Big Boss telling him to get back in the SUV and pack a bag, had taken barely six hours. The next morning, he was given a plane ticket to Minneapolis and GPS coordinates to a dead-end road in a forest across the river in Wisconsin.
That was the kind of unpleasant situation Prange could deal with, because it felt like it was within his control, and he could bring it to some sort of resolution in a short period of time. Even if the resolution was a bad outcome, Prange felt like he was the kind of guy that could recover from it and get on with things. Unless the bad outcome was his death, of course, in which case it simply didn’t matter anymore.
Part of the reason why Prange had never gotten arrested was that the idea of jail terrified him. Having to just sit and wait and do nothing until his constitutionally guaranteed “speedy” trial was scheduled and held was one of the worst things he could imagine. He was so phobic of that scenario that he’d developed a nearly obsessive degree of fastidiousness around keeping everything he could completely above board and clean. A fortunate side effect was that it made him a great middle-manager in the narcotics business. He ran efficient operations where raw materials came in, drugs went out, and money came back, with minimal loss at any step in the process.
Unfortunately, Nevada and Bowman had both shown that his obsessive care worked just fine when all the moving parts were meshing smoothly and according to plan. Throw a moderately sized monkey wrench into the works, and events would catch up with him, sometimes very rapidly and with disastrous effect.
And so, Daniel Prange found himself in an insignificant burg too small to merit a stoplight, locked in a repurposed closet in the basement of the town hall. The isolation and the sense of being penned in was messing with him bad enough that he’d already lost track of the number of days he’d been in custody. He wished he could have blamed the disorientation on the pain pills for his badly broken ribs, but he hadn�
��t been given any. Not out of cruelty, but because there simply weren’t any to give him. He knew this: when he’d briefly had full control of the town, he’d been able to get inventories of its supplies. There was nothing in the town more powerful than extra-strength ibuprofen, and in limited quantities, at that.
He tried to count the number of visits he’d gotten from Mark Thorssen. There was no way to forget that guy, but to use that to determine the number of days he’d been locked down would require knowing whether his checkups were daily or at some other interval. He certainly couldn’t figure the passage of time by the number of meals he’d had. There was so little variation anymore that he couldn’t tell if he was being served breakfast, lunch, or dinner.
The only viable option Prange could see to get himself out of his situation was escape. The problem was that his captors had really done a good job of removing anything he could have used as a makeshift weapon or to dig his way out or pop the hinges off the door. With his busted ribs, fighting his way out bare-handed wasn’t going to happen. He’d also noticed they were smart enough to never get near him armed, so there was no chance to make a quick grab for a guard’s weapon.
And now that it was open knowledge to the entire town that his cover story was a lie, that he was from a drug cartel, his attempts at winning his guards over were falling flat. He’d tried a couple of times to claim that the cartel would be back for him, and real good things would happen to the folks who helped him out, but he got completely stonewalled. He figured too many people had lost too much while he’d had brief control of the town for them to want to double down with him. When he really thought about it, he couldn’t be sure that the cartel even knew he was alive. And if they did, he wasn’t sure they’d care.
Carter might, if he’d managed to get out alive. The rest of the guys, probably not. After the way the whole operation had gone sideways under his leadership, whoever on his crew had gotten out probably wouldn’t jump up at the chance to come work for him again.
So, he resigned himself to slowly eroding his way to nothing while waiting for Grossman to go through whatever proper channels he’d devised to make sure he got a fair trial. Prange knew that he’d be found guilty of whatever they decided to accuse him of. He had no doubt about that. Whether they’d do the decent thing and just take him out back and shoot him or keep him locked in a closet until he was just a gibbering mess was unknown. He didn’t want to waste any time thinking about it, but there really wasn’t anything else to occupy himself with while he waited.
5
Ever since the Event, Peter felt like his life had been a non-stop series of calculated risks. There was no such thing anymore as just doing something. Every single choice had to be measured in terms of what the benefits and potential consequences of action versus inaction were. Just going with the flow or being in the moment were no longer options.
Of the calculated risks the homestead had taken, some had come with expensive consequences, like the two gunshot wounds Peter was recovering from after going down to help liberate Bowman. Yes, the end result was an overall success, but he or any of the four people that had gone with him could have easily been killed as well.
Other risks had turned out much better, with the benefits by far outweighing the costs. Peter reflected that bringing Chuck Larson into the fold was one of them.
Chuck was the newest member of the household, having come up for help when his parents had been roughed up and arrested by Prange’s men when they came to shut down their bar.
It was an act of sheer desperation by Chuck. He had been a bully his entire life and had almost no friends. Nobody on the school football team had any use for him, because he was strong and with the fighting instincts of a brawler. One of his favorite things had always been to catch athletes alone, where his strength and ferocity put him at a comfortable advantage.
The uncertainty of everything around the Event had initially brought out the worst in him. Then he had watched his parents get beaten down by armed men who were colder and harder than he was, and armed with automatic rifles. The tables had been turned on the bully, and for the first time in his life, he needed somebody stronger than himself to rely on. Somehow, he had decided the Meier family was what he needed, and he came up to see if they could do anything at all for him.
In the days that followed, including the fight to retake Bowman, Chuck had undergone a sea change. He was still rather rough around the edges, being a bit of an ass was still a big part of his personality, and he was still sometimes moody. But he was also handy and inventive, and not afraid of hard work. He had learned the value of working with people instead of against them.
After Prange’s men had been thrown out of Bowman and his parents released from custody, he’d stayed at home for a couple of days before he came back up to the Meier homestead. Nobody said it out loud, but Peter was pretty sure his home life had never been that stable or happy.
One of the collateral benefits that Chuck brought to the homestead, as the result of his parents having owned a bar and grille, was that he knew how to throw down meals fast and had an intuitive sense of how to keep his workspace clean and organized. It really freed Nancy up to get out of the kitchen more often and work outside the house.
Despite this, the kitchen was the one place where Chuck would stretch his work out and take longer than he needed in completing his tasks. He wasn’t alone in that, though. The whole household was guilty of it.
Among the things that Art Meier had kept in a well-shielded faraday box in the basement was a spare power inverter and battery charger for the solar cells on the roof of the house. It gave them a small, but reliable, supply of power. Enough to get a few hours of light if they wanted to read late at night, to power the well pump, put a charge on a couple cordless power tools. Simple things.
Another item in the faraday box had been a shortwave radio. In Art’s notes, Nancy had found a set of frequencies that he’d discovered that had reliable traffic. In his notes, Art had noted how the use of shortwave went way down with the advent of the internet, but there were still some old diehards broadcasting on it.
The radio was an old analog model, with manual dials and an analog signal-strength gauge. In his spare time, Bill Roth had carefully popped the front glass of the gauge and installed a maximum indicator. They kept the radio powered on all the time, with a notebook beside it. At every patrol shift change, somebody would write down the maximum signal intensity that had been hit during the shift, then retune it to another one of Art’s frequencies.
Over time, they’d been able to narrow down their monitoring to a smaller number of frequencies that seemed to most often yield a high-strength signal. The radio stayed in the kitchen, since that was the room most often occupied. About ten days after the Event, the first noise that was arguably a human voice was heard. Since then, a couple times a day, a couple stray syllables or words came through. The tiny snips didn’t seem to be in English, and nothing came through that was recognizable in any other language anybody at the homestead could recognize.
As the enigmatic sounds became more frequent, mealtimes became quieter. Every time the shortwave squawked, the whole table would go silent for a minute or two, waiting to see if there would be more, then everybody would toss out their best guesses as to what the language might have been. The growing excitement around the steadily increasing number of dispatch fragments had people trying to trade each other for inside chores, hoping they’d be the one to hear the first coherent message that came across.
It happened one afternoon while Peter and Irene were walking the back of the property while she pointed out different useful plants growing in the wild grass between the mowed yard and the tree line. Chuck came sprinting out of the house at them. He made no effort to move quietly, but Peter was glad that he at least had the presence of mind to not shout whatever news he had.
“Guys. Words. A whole sentence, I think, repeated a few times before I lost the signal.”
“On the
radio?” Peter asked Chuck.
“Yeah. Not English, but strong and clear for a bit.”
“Then go!” Peter said to Irene and Chuck. They both hesitated until he waved them on. “Go!” He appreciated their desire to move at the speed his leg wound would allow, but if there were full sentences coming across the shortwave, he needed ears on it.
By the time he made it to the house, Bill and Nancy were at the table as well, but there was only light static coming from the shortwave.
“Sorry. Nothing new since I ran to get you,” Chuck said.
Peter sat down at the table. “It’s all right. Can you at least remember some of it?”
Chuck pulled out a piece of paper with hastily scribbled text on it. “Dale Strict Try Try Sex Fear Dry Sending Us Earl Ungen. There was more, but the beginning was all I could catch with it being foreign. Sounded European, but I couldn’t guess more than that.”
“Just that?” Nancy asked.
“Pretty much,” Chuck said.
“If they’re repeating the message, I wonder if it’s a call sign or station ID,” Nancy said.
“Some of those could be German numbers,” Bill said.
“Hold on,” Peter said. He went to the house’s office and picked up the folder of his father’s shortwave notes. “This frequency was a student radio station operating out of a place called Erlangen in Germany.”
Bill pointed to the paper. “Did anything they said sound like this?”
Chuck mouthed out the words, concentrating heavily. “No. I don’t think I heard anything like that.”
Age of Survival Series | Book 3 | Age of Revival Page 3
